Post Censorship

[Hooovahh]

So what is the state of posts being censored for vulgar content?  A quick test on another subforum showed that there were pleny of words I couldn't post, because they would be replaced by "**bleep**" but there are other users of the forums that could say these words without being censored.

I also can't seem to find it at the moment but we had a case recently where a user name which was the persons last name wasn't allowed because it had dick in it.  Also I'm a bit surprised it wasn't censored there, is it only certain subforums that get censored?

[LiliMcDonald]

By default, there are certain words that the Lithium platform adds to content filter list. The words on that list are restricted from being used. The admins can remove words from that list, as you saw in the case with Dick Tracy.

In the situation you mentioned, that is because employees are whitelisted to bypass that particular vulgar word content filter.

I think some fair points have been raised regarding why these filters should not be enabled. Although, keep in mind that you all are not aware of the thousands of spam posts we receive every year, and we need spam and content filters to help control that.

We can discuss this internally to determine how to best address the situation.

Thanks,

[LiliMcDonald]

We have been discussing this topic internally and have decided to keep the content filters as is for the most part. We will remove any words that may be causing issues with posts, usernames, documents, etc.

We do trust our users to behave appropriately and generally try to not overly moderate content. That being said, there is still an expectation that users remain civil and professional, and we will need to moderate as items conflict with our User Guidelines or Terms of Use.

If there were vulgar content posted, it would be moderated accordingly. Having content filters in place can help prevent that from happening in the first place.

Thanks,

[Hooovahh]

---

@LiliMcDonald wrote:

If there were vulgar content posted, it would be moderated accordingly. Having content filters in place can help prevent that from happening in the first place.

---

Thanks for following up on this discussion, but I don't agree with this statement.  There are always going to be many permutations of words that aren't going to get filtered.  Just using leet speak alone means there are probably thousands of keywords that would need to be filtered.  Users that want to be vulgar are going to be regardless of the filters put in place.

[LiliMcDonald]

I definitely agree, and could have been more clear in my reply. Content filters can help prevent some vulgar content from happening, but there are always w4y5 4r0und 7h47. Also, if content is posted and it's censored with *bleeps*, the sentiment is still there of course. Either way -- both incidents would be manually moderated according to our User Guidelines.